Conceptual metaphor theory

Zoltán Kövecses

1. INTRODUCTION AND A DEFINITION

Conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) started with George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s book,
Metaphors We Live By (1980). The theory goes back a long way and builds on centuries of
scholarship that takes metaphor not simply as an ornamental device in language but as a
conceptual tool for structuring, restructuring and even creating reality. Notable philosophers
in this history include, for instance, Friedrich Nietzsche and, and more recently, Max Black. A
recent overview of theories of metaphor can be found in Gibbs, ed. 2008 and that of CMT in
particular in Kövecses 2010a.

Since the publication of Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) work, a large amount of research
has been conducted that has confirmed, added to and also modified their original ideas.
Often, the sources of the new ideas were Lakoff and Johnson themselves. Given this
situation, it is obvious that what we know as conceptual metaphor theory today is not
equivalent to the theory of metaphor proposed in Metaphors We Live By. Many of the critics
of CMT assume, incorrectly, that CMT equals Metaphors We Live By. For this reason, I will
not deal with this kind criticism in this introduction to CMT.

The standard definition of conceptual metaphors is this: A conceptual metaphor is

understanding one domain of experience (that is typically abstract) in terms of another (that
is typically concrete). This definition captures conceptual metaphors both as a process and a
product. The cognitive process of understanding a domain is the process aspect of
metaphor, while the resulting conceptual pattern is the product aspect. In this survey of the
theory, I will not distinguish between the two aspects.

2. MAIN CONCEPTS AND DEVELOPMENT OF CMT

In this section, I attempt to spell out the main features of CMT, as I see them. Other
researchers might emphasize different properties of the theory. At the same time, I tried to
select those features on which there is some agreement among practitioners of CMT.

2.1. Metaphors are all-pervasive

In their Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) suggested that metaphors are
pervasive not only in certain genres striving to create some artistic effect (such as literature)
but also in the most neutral, i.e., most non-deliberately used forms of language. CMT
researchers, especially in the early stages of work on conceptual metaphors, collected
linguistic metaphors from a variety of different sources: TV and radio broadcasts,
dictionaries, newspapers and magazines, conversations, their own linguistic repertoires, and
several others. They found an abundance of metaphorical examples, such as “defending an
argument”, “exploding with anger”, “building a theory”, “fire in someone’s eyes”,
“foundering relationship”, “a cold personality”, “a step-by-step process”, “digesting an idea”,
“people passing away”, “wandering aimlessly in life”, and literally thousands of others.
Most, if not all, of such linguistic metaphors are part of native speakers’ mental lexicon. They
derive from more basic senses of words and reflect a high degree of polysemy and
idiomaticity in the structure of the mental lexicon. The magnitude of such cases of polysemy
and idiomaticity in the lexicon was taken to be evidence of the pervasiveness of metaphor.
Based on such examples, they proposed what came to be known as “conceptual
metaphors.” However, CMT does not claim that each and every metaphor we find in
discourse belongs to a particular conceptual metaphor.

Other researchers, however, find the presence of metaphor in real discourse less
pervasive. As noted by Gibbs (2009), different methods produce different results in
frequency counts of metaphors.

2.2. Systematic mappings between two conceptual domains

The standard definition of conceptual metaphors we saw in section 1 can be reformulated

somewhat more technically as follows: A conceptual metaphor is a systematic set of
correspondences between two domains of experience. This is what “understanding one
domain in terms of another” means. Another term that is frequently used in the literature
for “correspondence” is “mapping”. This is because certain elements and the relations
between them are said to be mapped from one domain, the “source domain”, onto the
other domain, the “target.” Let us illustrate how the correspondences, or mappings, work
with the conceptual metaphor ANGER IS FIRE. Before I provide the systematic conceptual
mappings that constitute this metaphor, let us see some linguistic metaphors, as derived by
the lexical method, that make the conceptual metaphor manifest in English:

That kindled my ire.

Those were inflammatory remarks.
Smoke was coming out of his ears.
She was burning with anger.
He was spitting fire.
The incident set the people ablaze with anger.

Given such examples, the following set of correspondences, or mappings, can be proposed:

the cause of fire  the cause of anger

causing the fire  causing the anger
the thing on fire  the angry person
the fire  the anger
the intensity of fire  the intensity of anger

With the help of these mappings, we can explain why the metaphorical expressions listed
above mean what they do: why, for instance, kindle and inflammatory mean causing anger,
and why burning, spitting fire, and being ablaze with anger indicate a high intensity of anger,
with probably fine distinctions of intensity between them.
This set of mappings is systematic in the sense that it captures a coherent view of fire
that is mapped onto anger: There is a thing that is not burning. An event happens (cause of
fire) that causes the fire to come into existence. Now the thing is burning. The fire can burn
at various degrees of intensity.
Similarly for anger: There is a person who is not angry. An event happens that causes
the person to become angry. The person is now in the state of anger. The intensity of the
anger is variable.
The mappings bring into correspondence the elements and the relations between the
elements in the fire domain (source) with elements and the relations between the elements
in the anger domain (target). Indeed, it seems reasonable to suggest that, in a sense, the
mappings from the fire domain actually bring about or create a particular conception of
anger relative to the view of fire we have just seen. This is what it means that a particular
source domain is used to conceptualize a particular target domain. (I will come back to this
issue later.)
In many cases, however, the two-domain account does not work and must be
supplemented by a model of explanation that relies on four domains, or spaces (see chapter
3 on conceptual integration and metaphor).
Given the metaphorically used set of elements in a domain, we can derive further
knowledge about these elements, and can also map this additional knowledge onto the
target. This additional kind of source-domain knowledge is often called “metaphorical
inference,” or “metaphorical entailment”. For example, to stay with the metaphor above, in
somewhat formal and old-fashioned English we can find sentences like “He took revenge
and that quenched his anger.” Quenching anger can be regarded as a metaphorical
inference, given the ANGER IS FIRE metaphor. If anger is metaphorically viewed as fire, then we
can make use of our further knowledge of anger-as-fire; namely, that the fire can be
quenched. CMT provides an elegant explanation of such cases of extending conceptual
metaphors.
At this point, an important question may arise: Can everything be mapped from one
domain to another? Obviously, not. Given a particular conceptual metaphor, there are many
things that cannot be mapped, or carried over, from the source to the target. For example,
given that THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS, the number of rooms or whether the building has a cellar or
an attic are not mapped. Several explanations have been offered to delimit the amount of
knowledge that can be transferred from the source. One of them is the “invariance
hypothesis” developed by Lakoff (1990). It suggests that everything from the source can be
mapped onto the target that does not conflict with the image-schematic structure of the
target. Another is proposed by Grady (1997), who claims, in essence, that those parts of the
source domain can be mapped that are based on “primary metaphors” (on “primary
metaphors”, see section 2.5.). Finally, Kövecses (2000a, 2002) proposed that the source
maps conceptual materials that belong to its main meaning focus or foci. It should be noted
that the three suggestions differ with respect to which part of a conceptual metaphor they
rely on in their predictions concerning what is mapped. The first one relies primarily on the
target, the second on the connection between source and target, and the third on properties
of the source. None of these are entirely satisfactory.

2.3. From concrete domain to abstract domain

As we just saw, CMT makes a distinction between a “source domain” and a “target domain”.
The source domain is a concrete domain, while the target is an abstract one. In the example
conceptual metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY, the domain of journey is much more concrete than the
target domain of life (that is much more abstract); hence, JOURNEY is the source (domain). In
general, CMT proposes that more physical domains typically serve as source domains for
more abstract targets, as in the LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor.

This observation is based on the examination of hundreds of conceptual metaphors

that have been discovered and analyzed in the literature so far (such as LIFE IS A JOURNEY, ANGER
IS FIRE, THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS). The assumption that most conceptual metaphors involve more
physical domains as sources and more abstract domains as targets makes a lot of intuitive
sense. For example, the notion of life is hard to pin down because of its complexity, that of
anger is an internal feeling that remains largely hidden from us, that of theory is a
sophisticated mental construct, and so on for other cases. In all of them, a less
tangible and thus less easily accessible target concept is conceptualized as and from
the perspective of a more tangible and thus a more easily accessible source concept.

In our effort to understand the world, it makes a lot more sense to move
conceptually in this particular direction: that is, to conceptualize the cognitively less
easily accessible domains in terms of the more easily accessible ones. Notice how odd
and unintuitive it would be to attempt to conceptualize journeys metaphorically as
life, fire as anger, or buildings as theories. We would not find this way of
understanding journey, fire, or building helpful or revealing, simply because we know
a lot more about them than about such concepts as life, anger, or theory. This is not
to say that the reverse direction of conceptualization never occurs. It may occur, but
when it does, there is always some special poetic, stylistic, aesthetic, and so on,
purpose or effect involved. The default direction of metaphorical conceptualization
from more tangible to less tangible applies to the everyday and unmarked cases.

2.4. Metaphors primarily occur in thought

According to CMT, metaphor resides not only in language but also in thought. We use
metaphors not only to speak about certain aspects of the world but also to think about
them. As we saw above, CMT makes a distinction between linguistic metaphors, i.e.,
linguistic expressions used metaphorically, and conceptual metaphors, i.e., certain
conceptual patterns we rely on in our daily living, to think about aspects of the world. For
example, metaphors such as LIFE IS A JOURNEY can actually govern the way we think about life:
we can set goals we want to reach, we do our best to reach those goals, we can make careful
plans for the journey, we can prepare ourselves for facing obstacles along the way, we can
draw up alternative plans in the form of choosing a variety of different paths, we can prefer
certain paths to others, and so on. When we entertain such and similar ideas, we actually
think about life in terms of the LIFE IS A JOURNEY conceptual metaphor. And, consequently, we
can use the language of journeys to also talk about life.

The idea that we think about a domain in terms of another can actually mean several
different things. In one sense, as above, people may be guided by a particular conceptual
metaphor in how they conceive of a domain, such as life. In another, given a conceptual
metaphor, they may utilize some of the implications of a particular domain they rely on
(such as JOURNEY) in a conceptual metaphor and apply those implications to the other domain
(such as LIFE) in their reasoning about it (see below for an example). Finally, it can also mean
that in the course of the online process of producing and understanding a linguistic
metaphor, the metaphor activates both the source and the target concept. (This issue is
discussed in chapter 35 on metaphor processing.)

A major consequence of the idea that metaphors are conceptual in nature, i.e., that
we conceive of certain things in metaphorical ways, is that, since our conceptual system
governs how we act in the world, we often act metaphorically.

When we conceptualize an intangible or less tangible domain metaphorically as, and

from the perspective of, a more tangible domain, we create a certain metaphorical reality.
We imagine life one way when we think of it as a journey (see above), and in another way
when we think of it as a theatre play, as reflected in Shakespeare’s famous lines “All the
world is a stage / and all men and women are merely players”. The two source domains
result in very different views on life, and in this sense they create very different realities.

Whenever a new source domain is applied to a particular target, we see the target
domain differently than we saw it before. The limiting case of this situation is the one when
a particular target domain does not exist at all, but by the application of one (or several)
source domain(s), it actually gets created. Very often, the etymologies of words for abstract
concepts reflect this early conceptualization. For example, COMPREHENSION (‘understanding’) is
clearly an abstract concept. Given the UNDERSTANDING IS GRASPING conceptual metaphor (as in “I
did not grasp what he said”, “He is slow on the uptake”), it makes sense that the English
word comprehend derives from the word that means ‘grasp’ in Latin.

This kind of “reality construction” is very common in advertising, where, often,

interesting or amusing cases of metaphorical reality get created. When advertisements for,
say, deodorants promise “24-hour protection”, they make us see a deodorant as our helper
or ally in a fight or war against an enemy. The enemy is no other than our own body odour.
So if we did not think of our body odour as our enemy before, i.e., as something we have to
be protected against, the advertisements can easily make us view it as such. In this manner,
the metaphors used in advertisements and elsewhere can create new realities for us. Such
realities are of course metaphorically defined. But this does not make them unimportant for
the way we live. If we think of our body odour as something we need to be protected against
and as a result go and buy a deodorant to overcome the enemy, we are clearly thinking and
acting according to a metaphorically-defined reality. This is a further example of how the
implications of a source domain for a particular target can be utilized (in a process I called
metaphorical inference or entailment above).

Finally, if metaphor is part of the conceptual system, it follows that conceptual

metaphors will also occur in any mode of expression of that system. Research indicates that
the conceptual metaphors identified in language also occur in gestures, visual
representations (such as cartoons), visual arts (such as painting), and others. This does not
mean that the metaphors found in these modes of expression are exactly the same as found
in everyday language and thought, but that a large number of them are (see, e.g., work by
Forceville 2008; Cienki and Müller 2008).

2.5. Conceptual metaphors are grounded

Why is a particular source domain paired with a particular target domain? The most
traditional answer to this question is to say that there is a similarity, or resemblance,
between two things or events. Several different types of similarity are recognized in the
literature: objectively real similarity (as in the roses on one’s cheeks), perceived similarity,
and similarity in generic-level structure. An example for perceived similarity would be a case
where certain actions in life and their consequences are seen as gambles with a win or lose
outcome in a gambling game; cf. LIFE IS A GAMBLING GAME. We can take as an example for the
last type of similarity the conceptual metaphor HUMAN LIFE CYCLE IS THE LIFE CYCLE OF A PLANT. The
two domains share generic-level structure that can be given as follows: In both domains,
there is an entity that comes into existence, it begins to grow, reaches a point in its
development when it is strongest, then it begins to decline, and finally it goes out of
existence. Based on this shared structure, the plant domain can function as a source domain
for the human domain. In other words, the similarity explains the pairing of this particular
source with this particular target; that is, the metaphor is grounded in similarity – though of
a very abstract kind.

In many other cases, however, this explanation does not work: The source cannot be
viewed as similar in any way to the target. CMT offers another explanation or justification for
the emergence of these metaphors as well. Let us take the conceptual metaphor in one of
the metaphor systems we examined in the previous section: INTENSITY IS HEAT. This metaphor
is a generic-level version of a number of conceptual metaphors like ANGER IS FIRE, ENTHUSIASM IS
FIRE, CONFLICT IS FIRE, and so on. The specific concepts share an intensity dimension that is
metaphorically conceptualized as heat. The concept of HEAT bears no resemblance to that of
INTENSITY whatsoever. Heat is a physical property of things that we experience with our
bodies, while intensity is a highly abstract subjective notion (on a par with purpose,
difficulty, or as a matter of fact, similarity). What, then, allows the use of HEAT as a source
domain for INTENSITY? CMT suggests that there is a correlation in experience between
intensity and heat. Often, when we engage in activities at a high intensity (be it physical or
emotional), our body develops body heat. In this sense, intensity is correlated with heat, and
this provides the motivation for the use of HEAT as a source domain for INTENSITY as a target.
The generic-level conceptual metaphor INTENSITY IS HEAT can then be regarded as grounded in
a correlation in experience between a sensory-motor experience and an abstract subjective
one.

Conceptual metaphors of this kind are called “primary metaphors” by Lakoff and
Johnson (see, e.g., 1999), who borrowed the term from Joe Grady (1997a, b). Grady
proposed a number of such metaphors in his dissertation (1997a), including SIMILARITY IS
CLOSENESS, PERSISTENCE IS BEING ERECT, and reanalyzed several of the conceptual metaphors in
Lakoff and Johnson’s early work (1980) along the same lines (e.g., MORE IS UP, PURPOSES ARE
DESTINATIONS). He suggested furthermore that several primary metaphors can be put together
to form “compound metaphors.” For example, the PURPOSEFUL LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor is
based on the primary metaphors PURPOSES ARE DESTINATIONS, DIFFICULTIES ARE IMPEDIMENTS, and
others.

Many conceptual metaphors (both the similarity-based ones and the primary
metaphors) are based on “image schemas.” These are abstract, preconceptual structures
that emerge from our recurrent experiences of the world (Johnson, 1987; Lakoff, 1987).
Such skeletal preconceptual structures include CONTAINER, SOURCE-PATH-GOAL, FORCE, VERTICALITY,
and several others. For example, the STATES ARE CONTAINERS primary metaphor derives from
the CONTAINER image schema, the LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor from the SOURCE-PATH-GOAL
schema, the EMOTIONS ARE FORCES metaphor from the FORCE schema, and so on.
 The research on primary metaphors has intensified the study of metaphors in the
brain. Lakoff (2008) suggested a “neural theory of metaphor”. In it, individual neurons in the
brain form neuronal groups, called “nodes”. There can be different types of neural circuits
between the nodes. In the “mapping circuit” that characterizes metaphor, there are two
groups of nodes corresponding to source and target domain. The circuitry between the two
groups of nodes will correspond to the mappings, or correspondences. In primary
metaphors, one group of nodes represents a sensorimotor experience in the brain, while the
other represents an abstract, subjective experience.

2.6. Provenance of source domains

Since the human body and the brain are predominantly universal, the metaphorical
structures that are based on them will also be predominantly universal. This explains why
many conceptual metaphors, such as KNOWING IS SEEING, can be found in a large number of
genetically unrelated languages. This does not mean, however, that all conceptual
metaphors that are based on primary metaphors will be the same from language/culture to
language/culture. It was recognized early on that the particular culture in which a metaphor
develops is just as significant in shaping the form of the conceptual metaphors in different
languages/cultures as the universal bodily experiences themselves (see, e.g., Taylor and
MacLaury 1995; Yu 1998, 2002; Musolff 2004). Furthermore, several researchers pointed out
that variation in metaphor can also be found within the same language/culture (for a survey
of this research, see, e.g., Kövecses 2005).

As the latest development in this trend, scholars have recognized that it is not only
culture that functions as an important kind of context in shaping the metaphors that
emerge. More and more researchers in this area take into account the tight connection
between metaphorical aspects of our cognitive activities and the varied set of contextual
factors that influence the emergence of metaphors (see, e.g., Cameron 2003; Semino 2008;
Goatly 2007; Gibbs and Cameron 2008; Kövecses 2010b). The overall result is a much richer
account of metaphor. First, it has become possible to account for metaphors that may be
completely everyday but at the same time do not fit any pre-established conceptual
metaphors (see, e.g., the work by Musolff 2004; Semino 2008; and others). Second, by taking
into account the role of context, we are now in a much better position to see a fuller picture
of metaphorical creativity than before. Indeed, it can be suggested that contextual factors
can actually create novel metaphors that can be referred to as “context-induced” ones
(Kövecses 2010b, 2015). Third, these context-induced metaphors are not limited to the kinds
of basic correlations in experience that form the bases of primary metaphors. Thus, we seem
to have a cline of metaphors, ranging from universal primary metaphors to non-universal
context-induced ones. In other words, metaphors can derive from the body, cultural
specificities, and also the more general context.

3. AN EXAMPLE OF CURRENT RESEARCH IN CMT: INTERLOCKING METAPHOR

HIERARCHIES

As we have seen above, the source domains of conceptual metaphors constitute coherent
organizations of experience, and the mappings from the source onto the target domains
create equally systematically organized target domains. But the question is whether such
systematic source to target mappings are isolated from each other. I suggest that they are
likely to belong to larger, hierarchically organized systems of metaphors.
 The principles for the organization of such metaphor systems can be of several distinct
kinds. In one (a), the metaphors are organized in a straightforward hierarchy such that both
the source and the target are specific cases of higher generic-level concepts. In another (b),
different aspects of a given generic-level concept can be differentially conceptualized by
means of conceptual metaphors. In still other cases (c), a single aspect of several different
abstract concepts may organize a large number of subordinated specific-level conceptual
metaphors into a hierarchy. In a fourth (d), the conceptual metaphors form a system
because the target domains are part of an independently existing hierarchy of concepts. In a
fifth (e), what connects the conceptual metaphors and makes them form a system is the fact
that a particular specific level target concept is a special case of a number of different
higher-level concepts that have their own characteristic conceptual metaphors. There are
probably additional ways in which metaphor systems are formed, but for the present
purposes it is sufficient to take these five possibilities into account and briefly describe them.

3.1. Straightforward hierarchies

In this case, both the source and the target are specific-level concepts of generic-level
conceptual metaphors. This is the simplest and most straightforward type of hierarchy, and
it involves a large number of cases. Let us take the well-known ANGER IS A HOT FLUID metaphor.
This is an instance of the generic-level metaphor EMOTIONS ARE FORCES. Actually, the HOT FLUID
source can be further specified, yielding, for example, the concept of STEW as a potential
source domain. We can represent this as follows:

EMOTIONS ARE FORCES

ANGER IS A HOT FLUID IN A CONTAINER (He was boiling with anger.)

ANGER IS A STEW (He was stewing.)

We can find the same situation for love:

EMOTIONS ARE FORCES

LOVE IS A NATURAL FORCE (I was overcome with love.)

LOVE IS THE WIND (It was a whirlwind romance.)

3.2. Different aspects of a single generic concept

What is known as the Event Structure metaphor system presents a more complicated
situation (see Lakoff 1993). Events in general (i.e., the generic-level concept of event) can be
actions and occurrences, and they both involve states, causes and changes. Actions also
include long-term activities, where progress is an issue. Actions are characterized by
purposes, potential difficulty in execution, and manner of performance. These various
aspects of events (EVENT 1) are conceptualized in different ways:

Events: EVENTS ARE MOVEMENTS

Occurrences: OCCURRENCES ARE MOVEMENTS (What’s going on here?)

Actions: ACTIONS ARE SELF-PROPELLED MOVEMENTS (What’s going to be the next step?)
 Cause: CAUSES ARE FORCES (You’re driving me nuts.)

State: STATES ARE LOCATIONS / BOUNDED REGIONS (She’s in love.)

Change: CHANGE IS MOTION (FROM ONE LOCATION TO ANOTHER) (I almost went crazy.)

Actions: ACTIONS ARE SELF-PROPELLED MOVEMENTS

Purpose: PURPOSES ARE DESTINATIONS (I want to reach my goals.)

Difficulty: DIFFICULTIES ARE IMPEDIMENTS (TO MOTION) (Let’s get around this
problem.)

Manner: MANNER IS PATH (OF MOTION) (We’ll do it in another way.)

Activity: LONG-TERM PURPOSEFUL ACTIVITIES ARE JOURNEYS (We have a long

way to go with this project.)

Progress: EXPECTED PROGRESS IS A TRAVEL SCHEDULE (I am way behind

schedule.)

As we can see, the highest-level metaphor here is related to the overarching category of
events: EVENTS ARE MOVEMENTS. Events come in several forms, and they are characterised by a
variety of different aspects. The various forms and aspects of events are in turn
metaphorically viewed in terms of the source domains of movement, location and force.
These can of course be further elaborated at still more specific levels of concepts.

3.3. A single aspect of several different specific-level concepts

Several conceptual metaphors may belong together by virtue of the fact that they share a
particular aspect that is conceptualized metaphorically by means of the same source
domain. The target domains to which a single source domain is applied is the “scope of a
source domain” (Kövecses, 2000a, 2010a). Thus, the scope of a source can be narrow or
wide. Consider the following conceptual metaphors:

ANGER IS FIRE (He was smouldering with anger.)

LOVE IS FIRE (The fire was gone from their relationship.)

DESIRE IS FIRE (It was his burning ambition to become a lawyer.)

IMAGINATION IS FIRE (The scene set fire to his imagination.)

ENTHUSIASM IS FIRE (He lost the fire.)

CONFLICT IS FIRE (The fire of war burnt down Europe several times in the course of its
history.1)

ENERGY IS FIRE (She’s burning the candle at both ends.)

1
It might be worth mentioning in connection with this example that it has both a literal and a metaphorical
interpretation. Clearly, it is the latter that is intended here.
All of these target domains share the aspect of (degrees of) intensity through the application
of a single source (HEAT OF FIRE). We can suggest that the FIRE source domain has the “main
meaning focus” of intensity (Kövecses, 2000a, 2010a). Thus, one way of metaphorically
understanding intensity is in terms of the heat of fire. This yields the generic metaphor
INTENSITY IS HEAT. Consequently, the specific metaphors above are instances of this generic-
level metaphor. This is a further way in which conceptual metaphors may form a hierarchical
system. As a matter of fact, primary metaphors (see 2.5.) can be seen as forming such
systems in a natural way, since their target domains represent shared aspects (like intensity)
of several different concepts.

3.4. Several different aspects of a single specific-level concept

A specific-level abstract concept may inherit conceptual metaphors from several different
generic-level metaphor systems by virtue of the fact that its prototypical cognitive-cultural
model consists of elements that belong to the different metaphor systems. We can
exemplify this with the specific-level abstract concept of friendship (Kövecses 1995). The
model of friendship conceptually partakes of a number of different metaphor systems. Since
according to the cognitive-cultural model of friendship,

it is a state that two people attribute to each other,

it involves communication between the friends,

it implies mutual interaction with each other,

it consists of the friends and their interactions as a complex system,

it includes participants that feel certain emotions towards each other,

and some others,

the conceptual metaphors that characterize friendship include the following:

State metaphor system:

STATES ARE OBJECTS

ATTRIBUTED STATES ARE POSSESSED OBJECTS (Lakoff 1993)

Communication metaphor system:

THE MIND IS A CONTAINER

LINGUISTIC EXPRESSIONS ARE CONTAINERS

MEANINGS ARE OBJECTS

COMMUNICATION IS SENDING (Reddy 1979)

Interaction metaphor system:

INTERACTIONS ARE ECONOMIC EXCHANGES (Kövecses 1995)

Complex system metaphor system:

 ABSTRACT COMPLEX SYSTEMS ARE COMPLEX PHYSICAL SYSTEMS (Kövecses 1995, 2010a)

Emotion metaphor system:

EMOTION IS DISTANCE

EMOTION IS TEMPERATURE (Kövecses 1990, 2000b)

The conceptual metaphors for friendship emerge from these various metaphor systems.
Specifically, we find metaphors such as the following in the descriptions of friendship:

State metaphor system:

FRIENDSHIP IS A POSSESSED OBJECT (My friendship with her did not last long.)

Communication metaphor system:

SHARING (COMMUNICATING) EXPERIENCES IS SHARING OBJECTS: (We share intimate things with
each other.) (Kövecses 1995, 2000b)

The metaphor arises because communication between friends often involves sharing ideas
and feelings.

Interaction metaphor system:

INTERACTIONS IN FRIENDSHIP ARE ECONOMIC EXCHANGES (There is a lot of give and take in our
friendship.) (Kövecses 1995)

The interactions are conceptualized as “economic” exchanges because people often mention
a fifty-fifty basis in their friendship interactions, which indicates not just a physical exchange
of objects.

Complex system metaphor system:

FRIENDSHIP IS A COMPLEX PHYSICAL SYSTEM (BUILDING, MACHINE, PLANT) (We have built a strong
friendship over the years.) (Kövecses 1995, 2010a)

Emotion metaphor system:

AN EMOTIONAL RELATIONSHIP IS A DISTANCE (They have a close friendship.)

EMOTION IS TEMPERATURE (They have a warm friendship.) (Kövecses 1990, 2000b)

The last two conceptual metaphors have to do with the notion of intimacy that characterize
several emotions, yielding the metaphors INTIMACY IS CLOSENESS and INTIMACY IS WARMTH (both of
which are primary metaphors).

More generally, since aspects of friendship constitute a part of these metaphor systems,
the hybrid concept of friendship will share with them the specific metaphors.

3.5. The target concepts form a hierarchical system of concepts

The best example for this kind of metaphor system is what is called the Great Chain of Being
(Lakoff and Turner 1989). This is a hierarchical system of concepts corresponding to objects
and entities in the world, such as humans, animals, physical things, and so on. The extended
version of this hierarchy consists of the following (Lakoff and Turner 1989; Kövecses 2010a):

God

Complex systems (universe, society, mind, theories, company, friendship, etc.)

Humans

Animals

Plants

Complex physical objects

Inanimate objects

The hierarchy becomes a metaphor system when things on a particular level are
conceptualized as things on another level. Notice that this can happen in both directions.
Lower-level concepts can function as source domains for higher-level ones as target (e.g.,
PEOPLE ARE ANIMALS) and higher-level ones can function as source domains for lower-level ones
as target (e.g., ANIMALS ARE PEOPLE). Furthermore, the HUMAN, ANIMAL and PLANT categories are
often graded internally – a conceptualization that can lead to racist language (e.g., an
“inferior race”).

In summary, conceptual metaphors are not isolated conceptual patterns in the mind
but seem to cluster together to form a variety of interlocking hierarchical relationships with
each other.

4. CRITIQUE OF CMT

In the world of academia, CMT is in a curious situation: despite its many undeniable
achievements, its obvious usefulness in and popularity across several disciplines, each and
every aspect of it has come under criticism in the past thirty years. Indeed, several scholars
have expressed their skepticism regarding the very existence of conceptual metaphors (e.g.,
Cameron and Maslen, eds., 2010).

A further curious aspect of the situation is that a considerable body of the criticism is
based on Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) work exclusively, which represents only the initial
stage of CMT, ignoring much of the later work in CMT. Since this chapter has described, or at
least briefly mentioned, some of that work subsequent to Metaphors We Live By, I will not
take up the criticisms that relate to these features of CMT. I will not discuss issues regarding
the processing of conceptual metaphors either, since these are described in another chapter
of the present volume (see chapter 35).

A charge that is sometimes levelled at CMT is that it works with the concept of
domain (as in the idea that conceptual metaphors involve two domains) and that is itself not
a well-defined concept and that it probably cannot be defined precisely at all. But, as a
matter of fact, CMT works with a fairly clear definition of a domain that goes back to
Fillmore’s definition of a frame: A domain, or frame, is a coherent organization of human
experience. This definition makes do in most cases.
 Another criticism maintains that CMT is based on circular reasoning. Here the claim is
that scholars in CMT use linguistic metaphors to identify conceptual metaphors, on the one
hand, and that at the same time they suggest that the linguistic metaphors exist because of
the already present conceptual ones, on the other. One cannot base the existence on
conceptual metaphors on linguistic metaphors and at the same time explain the presence of
linguistic metaphors on the basis of conceptual metaphors. However, this criticism ceased to
be valid after several experiments that did not involve language or linguistic metaphors
(beginning with Gibbs’ work in the early 1990s) unambiguously confirmed the existence of
conceptual metaphors. If conceptual metaphors have been proven to have psychological
reality by psycholinguistic experiments, linguists should not deny their existence; they
should work to see how they appear and function in language (and other modalities). (For
summaries of these experiments, see Gibbs 1994, 2006; Gibbs and Colston 2012.)

But the most commonly and strongly expressed criticism concerns methodological
issues; namely, how to identify metaphors in discourse, how the study of metaphor should
be based on real data (rather than just lexical or intuitive data), and others (see, e.g.,
Deignan 2005; Steen, et al. 2007). As I indicated above, we should now take these
developments as an integral part of CMT. However, the issue of the need to use of real data
for metaphor analysis reveals an apparently real weakness of CMT: it is that CMT
researchers do not pay sufficient attention to the discourse and social-pragmatic functions
of metaphor in real discourse. This sounds like a valid point. However, I do not think that
CMT should be thought of as a view of metaphor whose only job is to collect metaphorical
expressions, set up conceptual metaphors based on the expressions, lay out the mappings
that constitute those conceptual metaphors, and see how the particular conceptual
metaphors form larger systematic groups. A large further part of the mission of conceptual
metaphors is to describe the particular syntactic, discursive, social, pragmatic, rhetorical,
aesthetic, etc. behavior and function of the metaphors in real data. And this is precisely
something that is currently conducted by a great number of researchers (e.g., Low, et al. eds.
2010). But, to my mind, these researchers are not competing with more “traditional” CMT
scholars; instead, they are working out an aspect of CMT that was “neglected” by CMT
scholars. The addition is necessary and more than welcome. This kind of work is just as much
part of CMT as other aspects of the theory. In other words, I find that the “neglect” was not
really neglect. The lack of sufficient attention to the syntactic, pragmatic, etc. features of
metaphors resulted from CMT scholars’ effort to add a cognitive dimension to metaphor
that was mostly lacking in previous work. This was, and still is, the mission of CMT, in
collaboration with other metaphor researchers. Without pursuing that mission, we would
know much less about metaphor today.

5. THE PRESENT STATE AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS OF CMT

In my view, CMT is a complex and coherent theory of metaphor. As even the sketchy picture
above reveals, CMT is a theory of metaphor that is capable of explaining a variety of issues
concerning metaphor. In particular, it can explain:

- why we use language from one domain of experience systematically to talk about
another domain of experience;
- why the polysemy of words in the lexicon follows the patterns it does;
- why the senses of words are extended in the concrete-to-abstract direction;
- why children acquire metaphors in the sequence they do;
 - why the meanings of words emerge historically in the sequence they do;
- why many conceptual metaphors are near-universal or potentially universal;
- why many other conceptual metaphors are variable cross-culturally and
intraculturally;
- why many conceptual metaphors are shared in a variety of different modes of
expression (verbal and visual);
- why many metaphor-based folk and expert theories of a particular subject matter
are often based on the same conceptual metaphors;
- why so many conceptual metaphors are shared between everyday language and
literature (and other forms of non-everyday uses of language);
- why and how novel metaphors can, and do, constantly emerge;
- etc.

No other theory of metaphor is capable of explaining all of these issues. This does not mean,
however, that CMT has achieved a “state of perfection”, and that is has no room to develop
further. I have pointed out several issues where CMT scholars need to do much more to
explain the facts. One such issue was the discrepancy resulting from making use of different
methodologies in establishing the frequency of metaphors in discourse. Another outstanding
issue that was mentioned is which conceptual materials are carried over from one domain to
another. These are just some of the difficult questions that await answers, but there are
additional ones that need to be answered in the future.

On a more positive note, there are also several new research directions that promise
an even better understanding of metaphor than what we have today. Lakoff and his
colleague’s work on the neural theory of metaphor is one of them (see, e.g., Lakoff 2008).
What complicates research on the neural aspects of metaphor, which is itself extremely
complex, is that metaphor use is taking place in a variety of different types of context that
are constantly monitored by the brain in the course of metaphorical conceptualization.
These contextual factors can be regarded as actually priming the use of particular linguistic
metaphors that may or may not belong to conventional primary or compound conceptual
metaphors (see Kövecses 2015). The result is an extremely complex situation that
challenges, and calls for the cooperation of, researchers from a variety of different
disciplines, such as neuroscience, metaphor theory and pragmatics, just to mention a few.
This is a research project that will surely take several years to complete.

Finally, in section 3 we have seen that conceptual metaphors occur not in isolation
but in a variety of different and interlocking hierarchical structures. This poses several
challenges to researchers. First, how do such metaphorical hierarchies emerge in social
cognition? And more specifically, how do they emerge and how are they represented in the
brain? Second, how and on what basis do the users of metaphors select the appropriate
level at which they formulate their metaphors in discourse? Third, how can “context-
induced” metaphors be integrated into such hierarchical systems? Or, possibly, should we
suppose a larger system that would accommodate both the body-based and the non-body-
based metaphors? These are just some of the research issues for the future study of the
hierarchical organization of metaphors.

Even more generally, it can be suggested that CMT will continue to play a key role in
the development of cognitive linguistics as a general study of language (as well as several
other disciplines outside linguistics), as we keep discovering its extensive presence at all
levels of linguistic description and its important contribution to connecting mind with the
body, language with culture, body with culture, and language with the brain.

Further readings:

Barcelona, A. (ed) (2000) Metaphor and Metonymy at the Crossroads, Berlin: Mouton.

Cameron, L. and Low, G. (eds) (1999) Researching and Applying Metaphor, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Gibbs, R.W. (ed) (2008) The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, Cambridge and
New York: Cambridge University Press.

Gibbs, R.W. and Steen, G. (eds) (1999) Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics, Amsterdam:
Benjamins.

Katz, A.N., Cacciari, C., Gibbs, R.W. and Turner, M. (1998) Figurative Language and Thought,
New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

References

Cameron, L. (2003) Metaphor in Educational Discourse, London: Continuum.

Cameron, L. and Maslen, R. (eds) (2010) Research Practice in Applied Linguistics, Social
Sciences and the Humanities, London: Equinox.

Cienki, A. and Müller, C. (2008) ’Metaphor, gesture, and thought,’ In R.W. Gibbs Jr. (ed.) The
Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, 483–501. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Deignan, A. (2005) Metaphor and Corpus Linguistics, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Forceville, C. (2008) ’Metaphors in pictures and multimodal representations,’ In R.W. Gibbs

Jr. (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, 462–482. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Gibbs, R.W. (1994) The Poetics of Mind, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
Press.

Gibbs, R.W. (2006) Embodiment and Cognitive Science, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Gibbs, R.W. (2009) ’Why do some people dislike conceptual metaphor theory,’ Journal of Cognitive
Semiotics, Vols. 1-2, 14-36.

Gibbs, R.W. and Coulston, H. (2012) Interpreting Figurative Meaning, Cambridge and New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Gibbs, R.W. and Cameron, L. (2007) ‘Social-cognitive dynamics of metaphor performance’,
Cognitive Systems Research, 9: 64-75.

Goatly, Andrew. (2008). Washing the Brain. Metaphor and Hidden Ideology. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins.

Grady, J. (1997a) ’Foundations of meaning: primary metaphors and primary scenes’

unpublished Ph.D. diss. Department of Linguistics, University of California at Berkeley.

Grady, J. (1997b) THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS revisited. Cognitive Linguistics 8: 267-290.

Johnson, M. (1987) The Body in the Mind, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Kövecses, Z. (1990) Emotion Concepts, Berlin and New York: Springer-Verlag.

Kövecses, Z. (1995) ‘American friendship and the scope of metaphor’, Cognitive Linguistics 6:
315–346.

Kövecses, Z. (2000a) ’The scope of metaphor’, in A. Barcelona (ed.) Metaphor and Metonymy
at the Crossroads, 79-92. Berlin: Mouton.

Kövecses, Z. (2000b) Metaphor and Emotion, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press.

Kövecses, Z. (2002) Metaphor. A Practical Introduction, Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press.

Kövecses, Z. (2005) Metaphor in Culture. Universality and Variation, Cambridge and New
York: Cambridge University Press.

Kövecses, Z. (2010a) Metaphor. A Practical Introduction, 2nd edn, Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press.

Kövecses, Z. (2010b) ‘A new look at metaphorical creativity in cognitive linguistics’, Cognitive

Linguistics, 21-4: 663-697.

Kövecses, Z. (2015) Where Metaphors Come From. Reconsidering Context in Metaphor,

Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Lakoff, G. (1987) Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press.

Lakoff, G. (1990) ‘The invariance hypothesis: Is abstract reason based on image schemas?’,
Cognitive Linguistics, 1-1: 39-74.

Lakoff, George. (1993). The contemporary theory of metaphor. In A. Ortony, ed., Metaphor
and Thought. Second edition. 202-251. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press.

Lakoff, G. (2008) ‘The neural theory of metaphor’, In R.W. Gibbs, (ed.) The Cambridge
Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, 17-38, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980) Metaphors We Live By, Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press.

Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1999) Philosophy in the Flesh, New York: Basic Books.

Lakoff, G. and Turner, M. (1989) More Than Cool Reason. A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor,
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Low, G., Todd, Z., Deignan, A. and Cameron, L. (eds) (2010) Researching and Applying
Metaphor in the Real World, Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Musolff, A. (2004) Metaphor and Political Discourse: Analogical Reasoning in Debates about
Europe, Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan.

Reddy, M. (1979) ‘The conduit metaphor’, in A. Ortony (ed.) Metaphor and Thought, 284–
324, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Semino, E. (2008) Metaphor in Discourse, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Steen, G, et al. (2007) ‘MIP: A method for identifying metaphorically used words in
discourse’, Metaphor and Symbol 22-1: 1-39.

Taylor, J.R. and MacLaury, R. (eds) (1995) Language and the Cognitive Construal of the
World, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Yu, N. (1998) The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor. A Perspective from Chinese,

Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Yu, N. (2002) ‘Body and emotion: body parts in Chinese expression of emotion’, Pragmatics
& Cognition 10-1: 341-367.